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Kelly McParland: White House bumbling leaves it in a corner of its own making on pipeline planhttp://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/kelly-mcparland-white-house-bumbling-leaves-it-in-a-corner-of-its-own-making-on-pipeline-plan
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/kelly-mcparland-white-house-bumbling-leaves-it-in-a-corner-of-its-own-making-on-pipeline-plan#commentsThu, 13 Nov 2014 19:08:19 +0000http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/?p=168299

Canadians who feel Canadian concerns are too often ignored by U.S. governments should take a moment to savour the unusual situation that has emerged in Washington. Not only has the U.S. capital been seized by an issue originating north of the border, but in a way that uniquely suits Canada’s in-built appreciation of the absurd. Mike Myers, Jim Carrey or Dan Aykroyd could kill with this sort of material.

The issue at hand is the Keystone XL pipeline, a project that would ship oil from Alberta to the Gulf Coast. By refusing to make a decision on the proposal since he came to office six years ago, President Barack Obama has elevated it from a relatively minor irritant to a make-or-break confrontation with a hostile Congress.

Mr. Obama could have killed the pipeline plan at any of several junctures just by declaring it dead. At one point he had the means to do so, thanks to Democratic numbers in the Congress and his own standing in opinion polls. Instead he delayed, insisting he would only pronounce judgement once all legal and regulatory challenges had been exhausted. Since there is always room for another legal challenge in the U.S. justice system, that all but ensured he could leave office after eight years without ever having to make a decision.

Mr. Obama’s dilatory approach meant Keystone had to win every legal barrier it faced to avoid handing the White House the excuse it needed to refuse approval. The delay also worked to push up the cost, which has now grown an estimated 50% to $8 billion according to TransCanada Corp. CEO Russ Girling. His refusal to make a decision has been an ongoing irritation in Canada-U.S. relations, despite Ottawa’s willingness to put Canadian lives at risk in support of the U.S.-led coalition against terrorists in Iraq and Syria.

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Nonetheless, the project has survived. The U.S. mid-term elections this month went badly against the Democrats, handing Republicans control of the Senate and increasing their hold on the House of Representatives. GOP leaders indicated approval of Keystone would be an early test of Mr. Obama’s stated wish to find areas of common ground. But before the leadership could even switch hands, members of Mr. Obama’s own party have forced the issue: southern Democrats who support the pipeline have pushed for a quick vote. Louisiana Democratic senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and her Republican opponent in a run-off election are supporting almost identical bills in the two houses of Congress. After two days of fevered activity, a vote could be held as early as Friday.

Mr. Obama is now in a no-win situation. Aides travelling with the President in Asia have indicated he would veto a bill approving Keystone. If he does so, he may please the left wing of his party while angering the substantiual block of Democrats who support the plan as one that would create jobs while enhancing U.S. energy security. If he lets the legislation pass he will be justifiably attacked for having created pointless delay and unnecessary expense at a time the U.S. economy was struggling. Democrats who blame Mr. Obama’s unpopularity for the shellacking they took in the midterms will be only further angered at a President who seems to delight in creating impediments for his own party. And Republicans will have good reason to withhold co-operation on issues important to the President, given his refusal to show the same consideration for their agenda.

Mr. Obama is largely responsible for painting himself into this corner. By ducking the question for so long he has forced himself into making a decision at a time of his opponents’ choosing. Keystone has always made sense: the U.S. needs the oil and pipelines are far safer and cleaner than the alternative of shipping it by rail. Canada is a far safer, cleaner and more reliable supplier than Saudi Arabia, Venezuela or Iraq. The President should let Congress do its work and accept the judgment of the people. Stubbornness is no substitute for leadership.

WASHINGTON — Unlike the dog that chased the car until, to its consternation, he caught it, Republicans know what do with what they have caught. Having completed their capture of control of the legislative branch, they should start with the following measures concerning practical governance and constitutional equilibrium:

* Abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This creature of the labyrinthine Dodd-Frank law violates John Locke’s dictum: “The legislative cannot transfer the power of making laws to any other hands. … The power of the legislative … [is] only to make laws, and not to make legislators.” The CFPB is empowered to “declare,” with no legislative guidance or institutional inhibitions, that certain business practices are “abusive.” It also embodies progressivism’s authoritarianism by being, unlike any entity Congress has created since 1789, untethered from all oversight mechanisms: Its funding, “determined by the director,” comes from the Federal Reserve.

* Repeal Obamacare’s tax on medical devices. This $29 billion blow to an industry that provides more than 400,000 jobs is levied not on firms’ profits but on gross revenues, and comes on top of the federal (the developed world’s highest) corporate income tax, plus state and local taxes. Enough Democrats support repeal that a presidential veto might be overridden.

* Improve energy, economic and environmental conditions by authorizing construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. The pipeline would reduce the risk of spills by reducing the transportation of oil in railroad tankers.

* Mandate completion of the nuclear waste repository in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. The signature achievement of Harry Reid’s waning career has been blocking this project, on which approximately $15 billion has been spent. So, rather than nuclear waste being safely stored in the mountain’s 40 miles of tunnels 1,000 feet underground atop 1,000 feet of rock, more than 160 million Americans live within 75 miles of one or more of the 121 locations where 70,000 tons of waste are stored.

* Pass the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act. It would require that any regulation with at least a $100 million annual impact on the economy — there are approximately 200 of them in the pipeline — must be approved without amendments by joint resolution of Congress and signed by the president. “In effect,” writes the Hudson Institute’s Christopher DeMuth, “major agency rules would become legislative proposals with fast-track privileges.” By requiring legislative complicity in especially heavy federal burdens, REINS is an ingredient in the recipe for resuscitating Congress, which has been far too eager to cede legislative responsibilities to the executive branch.

Such measures may be too granular to satisfy the grandiose aspirations of those conservatives who, sharing progressives’ impatience with our constitutional architecture, aspire to have their way completely while wielding just one branch of government. But if, as is likely, the result of Congress doing these and similar things is a blizzard of presidential vetoes, even this would be constructive. The 2016 presidential election would follow a two-year demonstration of how reactionary progressivism is in opposing changes to the nation’s trajectory. Congressional actions provoking executive rejections would frame the argument about progressivism. And as Margaret Thatcher advised, first you win the argument, then you win the vote.

WASHINGTON — President Obama is impatient. Congress won’t act on immigration, he says, and therefore he will. The White House is coy as to exactly what the president will do. But the leaks point to an executive order essentially legalizing an enormous new class of illegal immigrants, perhaps up to five million people.

One doesn’t usually respond to rumours. But this is an idea so bad and so persistently peddled by the White House that it has already been pre-emptively criticized by such unusual suspects as (liberal) constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley, concerned about yet another usurpation of legislative power by the “uber presidency,” and The Washington Post editorial page, which warned that such a move would “tear up the Constitution.”

If this is just a trial balloon, the time to shoot it down is now. The administration claims such an executive order would simply be a corrective to GOP inaction on the current immigration crisis — 57,000 unaccompanied minors, plus tens of thousands of families, crashing through and overwhelming the southern border.

This rationale is a fraud.

First, the charge that Republicans have done nothing is plainly false. Last week, the House of Representatives passed legislation that deals reasonably with this immigrant wave. It changes a 2008 sex-trafficking law never intended for (and inadvertently inviting) mass migration — a change the president himself endorsed before caving to his left and flip-flopping. It also provides funds for emergency processing and assistance to the kids who are here.

Second, it’s a total non sequitur. Suspending deportation for millions of long-resident illegal immigrants has nothing to do with the current wave of newly arrived minors. If anything, it would aggravate the problem by sending the message that if you manage to get here illegally, eventually you’ll be legalized.

Third, and most fatal, it is deeply unconstitutional. Don’t believe me. Listen to Obama. He’s repeatedly made the case for years. As in:

• “I swore an oath to uphold the laws on the books. … Now, I know some people want me to bypass Congress and change the [immigration] laws on my own. … That’s not how our Constitution is written” (July 25, 2011).

SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty ImagesPresident Barack Obama: Even the Washington Post says executive order is a bad idea.

• “This notion that somehow I can just change the laws unilaterally is just not true. … There are laws on the books that I have to enforce” (Sep. 28, 2011).

• “If, in fact, I could solve all these problems without passing laws in Congress, then I would do so. But we’re also a nation of laws” (Nov. 25, 2013).

Laws created by Congress, not by executive fiat. That’s what distinguishes a constitutional republic from the banana kind.

Moreover, Obama had control of both houses of Congress during his first two years in office — and did nothing about immigration. So why now?

Because he’s facing a disastrous midterm election. An executive order so sweeping and egregiously lawless would be impeachment bait. It would undoubtedly provoke a constitutional crisis and stir impeachment talk — and perhaps even the beginning of proceedings — thus scrambling the electoral deck. As in 1998, it would likely backfire against the GOP and save Democrats from an otherwise certain sixth-year midterm shellacking.

Such a calculation — amnesty-by-fiat to deliberately court impeachment — is breathtakingly cynical. But clever. After all, there is no danger of impeachment succeeding. There will never be 67 votes in the Senate to convict. But talking it up is a political bonanza for Democrats, stirring up an otherwise listless and dispirited base. Last Monday alone the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee raised more than $1 million from anti-impeachment direct mail.

Apart from the money, impeachment talk energizes Democrats and deflects attention from the real-life issues that are dragging them down — the economy, Obamacare, the failures of Obama’s foreign policy. Everything, in other words, that has sunk Obama to 40 percent approval, the lowest ebb of his presidency.

There’s an awful irony here. Barack Obama entered our national consciousness with an electrifying 2004 speech calling for healing the nation’s divisions and transcending narrow identities of race, region, religion, politics and ideology. Four years later, that promise made him president. Yet today he is prepared to inflict on the nation a destructive, divisive, calculated violation of the constitutional order and national comity — for the narrowest partisan advantage.

For this president in particular, who offered a politics of transcendence, this would constitute a betrayal of the highest order.

According to White House leaks, the executive order will be promulgated by summer’s end. Time enough to reconsider. Don’t do it, Mr. President.

WASHINGTON — On a day filled with both rising and falling hopes, President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans struggled inconclusively Thursday to find common ground that could avert an economy-tanking default and possibly end the 10-day-old partial government shutdown that has idled 350,000 federal workers.

“We expect further conversations tonight,” Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., said cryptically, after he, Speaker John Boehner and a delegation of House Republicans had met for an hour or so with Obama at the White House.

He spoke at dusk, long after Boehner first outlined a compromise proposal that the White House carefully avoided rejecting — only to have Senate Democrats declare it unacceptable.

“Not going to happen,” Majority Leader Harry Reid said brusquely. The Republican plan would leave the shutdown in place while raising the nation’s $16.7 trillion debt limit and setting up negotiations between the GOP and Obama over spending cuts and other issues.

Heartened by any hint of progress, Wall Street chose to accentuate the positive. After days of decline, the Dow Jones industrial average soared 323 points on hopes that the divided government was taking steps to avoid a default. Reid’s dismissive comments at the White House came at the end of the trading day.

Senate Republicans forged ahead on an alternative of their own that would ease both the debt-limit and shutdown crises at once. Officials said that it would require Obama to agree to some relatively modest changes to the health care law that stands as his signature domestic achievement.

The up-and-down day coincided with a dour warning from Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, who told lawmakers that the prospect of default had already caused interest rates to rise — and that worse lay ahead.

Appearing before the Senate Finance Committee, Lew said the Treasury must pay Social Security and veterans benefits as well as salaries to active duty military troops during the second half of this month. He said failure to raise the debt limit by Oct. 17 “could put timely payment of all of these at risk.”

House Speaker John Boehner led a delegation of fellow Republicans to the White House for a late-afternoon meeting with Obama as the two sides groped for a way out of the latest in a string of crises. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor later pronounced the meeting useful and said there would be further conversations.

“I would hope the president would look at this as an opportunity and a good faith effort on our part to move halfway, halfway to what he’s demanded, in order to have these conversations begin,” Boehner, R-Ohio, told reporters earlier in the day.

He spoke after informing his rank and file that he intends to bring legislation to the floor as early as Friday to let the Treasury borrow freely until Nov. 22, contingent on Obama’s agreement to open talks on legislation to reopen the government and discuss other pressing issues.

That would leave in effect the partial government shutdown, in its 10th day Thursday, that has idled 350,000 federal workers but so far has not produced the type of widespread economic hardship that a default might mean.

After more than a week of lost tourism, some governors prevailed on the Obama administration to let states use their own money to pay for national parks to reopen, Grand Canyon and Zion among them. There was a catch — the Interior Department made it clear it didn’t plan to reimburse the states after the shutdown ends.

Some tea party-aligned lawmakers claimed partial credit for the GOP retreat, casting it as a way of finessing one problem so they could quickly resume their own campaign to deny operating funds for the national health care overhaul known as “Obamacare.”

At the White House, spokesman Jay Carney told reporters the president would “likely sign” a short-term extension in the debt ceiling, and did not rule out his doing so even if it left the shutdown intact.

‘I would hope the president would look at this as an opportunity and a good faith effort on our part to move halfway’

Ironically, Boehner’s plan stirred grumbling among relatively moderate Republicans who said the shutdown should end, but little if any unhappiness among the staunch conservatives who often part company with party leaders.

One Republican said he and fellow tea party allies deserved at least partial recognition for the plan that would raise the debt limit without reopening the government.

“I actually went to (Majority Leader) Eric Cantor a couple days ago and I proposed this. I said, ’You’re going to think this is crazy but I, as a conservative, would be willing to vote for a debt ceiling for six weeks.,” said Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho.

Additionally, Sen. Ted Cruz, the conservative Texan who has played a prominent role in this fall’s budget struggles, raised no objections.

Interviewed on radio KFYO in Lubbock, Texas, he said, “My understanding is this is being driven by House conservatives who are quite reasonably saying, ’Listen, let’s focus on Obamacare, on winning the fight on Obamacare … and let’s push the debt ceiling a little further down the road so that it doesn’t distract us from the fight we are in the middle of right now.”

For his part, Reid has proposed no-strings-attached legislation to raise the debt limit by $1.1 trillion, enough to prevent a recurrence of the current standoff until after the 2014 elections.

In remarks on the Senate floor during the day, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the GOP leader, said that Democratic measure “just won’t fly. … The American people can be persuaded to raise the debt ceiling, but they’re not in any mood to simply hand over a blank check.”

Since the current standoff began more than two weeks ago, Republican demands have shifted continuously, while the president’s position has remained essentially unchanged.

The shutdown began on Oct. 1 after Obama ruled out any concessions that would defund, delay or otherwise change the new health care law. He said he would be willing to negotiate on a range of issues, but only after the shutdown was ended and the debt limit raised.

‘We expect further conversations tonight’

For their part, Republicans drafted a long list of demands to accompany any increase in the debt limit, including some that would raise the cost of Medicare for better-off beneficiaries, make changes to the health care law and roll back several environmental regulations either issued or in the planning stages by the administration.

In recent days, the focus has shifted from the shutdown to the threat of default, and Republicans have spoken less and less frequently about insisting on concessions in the health care law.

The call for negotiations on long-term deficit cuts would mark a return to basics for the House Republican majority.

Shortly after taking control in 2011, the rank and file initiated a series of demands to cut spending, culminating in an agreement with Obama that cut more than $2 trillion over a decade.

After four years of trillion-dollar deficits, the 2013 shortfall is expected to register below $700 billion.

At the same time, the nation’s debt rises inexorably. It was $10.6 trillion when Obama took office during the worst recession in decades, and has grown by $6.1 trillion in the years since.

WASHINGTON — Facing a fresh deadline, House Speaker John Boehner said Thursday that Republicans would vote to extend the government’s ability to borrow money for six weeks — but only if President Barack Obama first agrees to fresh negotiations on spending cuts. Under the Republican plan, the partial government shutdown would continue in the meantime.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said that Obama “would likely sign” a clean bill increasing the debt cap but that the president also wants Republicans to reopen the government. He did not rule out Obama agreeing to Boehner’s debt ceiling proposal if the government remains closed, but the White House made no promises that Obama would hold negotiations under those circumstances.

“He will not pay ransom in exchange for the Republicans in the House doing their job,” Carney said.

Obama is to meet with Boehner and other House GOP leaders at the White House Thursday afternoon.

After weeks of decline, financial market indexes shot higher in anticipation of a possible deal that could avert a federal financial default. Both the Dow Jones industrial average and Standard & Poor’s 500 index were up well over 1% in afternoon trading

“I would hope the president would look at this as an opportunity and a good faith effort on our part to move halfway, halfway to what he’s demanded, in order to have these conversations begin,” Boehner, R-Ohio, told reporters after presenting the plan to rank-and-file GOP lawmakers.

Boehner produced his proposal as the shutdown entered its 10th day. On that front, the administration said it would allow states to use their own money to reopen some national parks that have been closed.

Governors in at least four states — Utah, South Dakota, Arizona and Colorado — have asked for authority to reopen national parks within their borders because of the economic impact of the closures. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said the government will consider offers to pay for park operations but will not surrender control of national parks to the states.

As for the deeper problem of the federal debt ceiling, the administration has warned that unless the limit is raised, the government will deplete its ability to borrow money by next Thursday, an event officials have warned could trigger a default that could wound the world economy as well as America’s.

Obama has steadfastly insisted that Congress reopen the government and extend the debt limit without conditions. His acceptance of the GOP proposal could mean a brief resolution to the fight over the debt limit and a continuation of the shutdown while negotiations proceed.

Republicans have been demanding cuts in government programs, including Obama’s 2010 health care law, and a bigger effort to cut long-term federal deficits as their price for reopening government and extending the debt limit.

Obama has repeatedly noted recent improvement in the deficit figures. After four years of trillion-dollar deficits, the 2013 shortfall is expected to register below $700 billion.

Rep. Vern Buchanan, R-Fla., said the plan was for the House to approve the legislation Boehner described on Friday.

“It gets us down the road a little bit so they can continue to talk,” said Rep. Tim Griffin, R-Ark. Rep. Robert Pittinger, R-N.C., said the six-week extension would provide “an opportunity to bring the parties together.”

Some conservatives still expressed reservations. “I’m not very enthusiastic about that,” Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, said of Boehner’s plan.

Under Boehner’s offer, the House would also appoint negotiators to bargain with the Democratic-led Senate over a budget compromise. Those talks have been on hold for months, and the two chambers have deep differences over taxes and cuts in benefit programs.

Earlier Thursday, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew warned the Senate Finance Committee that failure to renew the government’s ability to borrow money “could be deeply damaging” to financial markets and threaten Americans’ jobs and savings. It would also leave the government unsure of when it could make payments ranging from food aid to Medicare reimbursements to doctors, he said.

“The United States should not be put in a position of making such perilous choices for our economy and our citizens,” the secretary said. “There is no way of knowing the irrevocable damage such an approach would have on our economy and financial markets.”

The game of Washington chicken over increasing the debt limit — required so Treasury can borrow more money to pay the government’s bills in full and on time — already has sent the stock market south, spiked the interest rate for one-month Treasury bills and prompted Fidelity Investments, the nation’s largest manager of money market mutual funds, to sell federal debt that comes due around the time the nation could hit its borrowing limit.

At the Finance committee hearing, Lew met a buzz saw of incredulity from Republicans, who said the bigger problem was the soaring costs of benefit programs like Social Security and Medicare and the long-term budget deficits the country faces. Many expressed doubt about Lew’s description of the consequences of default.

The senior Republican on the panel, Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, accused the Obama administration of “an apparent effort to whip up uncertainty in the markets.” And veteran Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyoming, said, “I think this is 11th time I’ve been through this discussion about the sky is falling and the earth will erupt. Wyoming families aren’t buying these arguments.”

Replied Lew, “After they run up their credit card, they don’t get to ignore it.”

Lew also rejected GOP suggestions that in the event federal borrowing authority expires, the government could use the dwindling cash it has to make payments to debt holders and other high priority needs. He said federal payment systems are not designed to prioritize and said he didn’t believe such an approach was technically possible.

He also fended off attempts by the top Republican on the committee, Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, and other GOP senators to learn how long a debt limit extension the president would like to see.

“Our view is this economy would benefit from more certainty and less brinksmanship. So the longer the period of time is, the better for the economy,” said Lew, who also repeated Obama’s willingness to accept a short-term extension for now.

The frustrating standoff in Washington is weighing down each side’s poll numbers, but Republicans are taking the worst drubbing. A Gallup poll put the approval rating for the Republican Party at a record-low 28 per cent. Polls have consistently said the Republicans deserve the greater share of blame for the shutdown.

Nowadays the federal government leavens its usual quotient of incompetence with large dollops of illegality. This is eliciting robust judicial rebukes, as when, last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia instructed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to stop “flouting the law.” Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh said: “It is no overstatement to say that our constitutional system of separation of powers would be significantly altered if we were to allow executive and independent agencies to disregard federal law in the manner asserted in this case.”

For six decades the nation has been studying the challenge of safely storing nuclear waste from weapons production, Navy vessels and civilian power plants. So far, more than $15 billion has been spent developing a waste repository system (in the 1980s, a Nevada senator misnamed it a waste “suppository”) deep within Yucca Mountain 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

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The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 says the NRC “shall consider” the Yucca Mountain application to become a repository, and “shall” approve or disapprove the application within three years of its submission. “Shall” means “must.” The application, submitted in June 2008, has not been acted upon, and the court says: “By its own admission, the commission has no current intention of complying with the law.” Judge A. Raymond Randolph’s concurring opinion said:

“Former (NRC) Chairman Gregory Jaczko orchestrated a systematic campaign of noncompliance. Jaczko unilaterally ordered commission staff to terminate the review process in October 2010; instructed staff to remove key findings from reports evaluating the Yucca Mountain site; and ignored the will of his fellow commissioners.”

Jaczko resigned last year, leaving the NRC in demoralized disarray. The New York Times reported “charges of mismanagement and verbal abuse of subordinates” and that all four of his fellow commissioners, two from each party, complained about Jaczko to the White House and told a congressional committee that (the Times reported) he “unprofessionally berated the agency’s professional staff and reduced female employees to tears with his comments.”

To be fair to him, he was put there to disrupt. He was put there by Nevada’s Sen. Harry Reid, on whose staff he had served.

Reid, like almost all Nevadans, regards the repository as a threat to Las Vegas

Reid seems uninterested in the metallurgy of waste containment vessels or the geology of the mountain’s 40 miles of storage tunnels where the waste would be stored 1,000 feet underground on 1,000 feet of rock. Rather, Reid, like almost all Nevadans, regards the repository as a threat to Las Vegas, a gamblers’ destination that lives off tourists who are demonstrably irrational about probabilities. Reid prefers the status quo — more than 160 million Americans living within 75 miles of one or more of the 121 locations where over 70,000 tons of nuclear waste are kept.

The court, which was concerned only with the law, not the mountain, said “the president must follow statutory mandates so long as there is appropriated money available and the president has no constitutional objection to the statute.” He has none, and Reid has not yet quite succeeded in starving the NRC of funding for the Yucca licensing process.

Congress sets the policy, not the commission

The NRC said Congress has not yet appropriated the full amount required to complete the process. The court said Congress often appropriates “on a step-by-step basis.” The NRC speculated that Congress may not finish appropriating the sums necessary. The court said that allowing agencies to ignore statutory mandates based on “speculation” about future congressional decisions “would gravely upset the balance of powers between the (government’s) branches and represent a major and unwarranted expansion of the executive’s power at the expense of Congress.”

The NRC said small appropriations indicate Congress’ desire to stop the licensing process. The court responded that “Congress speaks through the laws it enacts” and “courts generally should not infer that Congress has implicitly repealed or suspended statutory mandates based simply on the amount of money Congress has appropriated.” The court noted that, “as a policy matter,” the NRC may want to block the Yucca project but “Congress sets the policy, not the commission.” And the court said there is no permissible executive discretion to disregard “statutory obligations that apply to the executive branch.”

This episode is a snapshot of contemporary Washington — small, devious people putting their lawlessness in the service of their parochialism, and recklessly sacrificing public safety and constitutional propriety. One can only marvel at the measured patience with which the court has tried to teach the obvious to the willfully obtuse.

In May 1918, with America embroiled in the First World War, Iowa’s Gov. William Lloyd Harding dealt a blow against Germany. His Babel Proclamation — that was its title; you cannot make this stuff up — decreed: “Conversation in public places, on trains and over the telephone should be in the English language.” The proscription included church services, funerals and pretty much everything else.

Iowa’s immigrant communities that spoke Danish, Dutch, Norwegian and French objected to this censorship of languages of America’s wartime allies. Harding, however, said speaking any foreign language was an “opportunity [for] the enemy to scatter propaganda.” Conversations on street corners and over telephone party lines — Iowa telephone operators did the metadata-gathering that today’s National Security Agency does — resulted in arrests. Harding was ridiculed but Germany lost the war, so there.

The war validated Randolph Bourne’s axiom that “war is the health of the state,” but it killed Bourne, who died in December 1918 from the influenza epidemic the war unleashed. Today, as another war is enlarging government’s intrusiveness and energizing debate about intrusiveness, it is timely to remember that war is not the only, or even primary, cause of this.
Or, more precisely, actual war is not the only cause. Ersatz “wars” — domestic wars on various real or imagined vices — also wound the defense of limited government. So argue David B. Kopel and Trevor Burrus in their essay “Sex, Drugs, Alcohol, Gambling and Guns: The Synergistic Constitutional Effects.”

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Kopel and Burrus, both associated with Washington’s libertarian Cato Institute, cite the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Act, which taxed dealings involving opium or coca leaves, as an early example of morals legislation passed using Congress’ enumerated taxing power as a pretext. In 1919, the Supreme Court held that the law “may not be declared unconstitutional because its effect may be to accomplish another purpose as well as the raising of revenue.”

Its “effect”? The effect of suppressing the drug business obviously was its purpose. Nevertheless, the court held that even if “motives” other than raising revenue really explained Congress’ exercise of its enumerated power, the law still could not be invalidated “because of the supposed motives which induced it.”

“Supposed”? The court’s refusal to reach a reasonable conclusion about the pretext Congress used in this case for trespassing on territory reserved to the states enabled the federal government to begin slipping out of its constitutional leash. In 1922, Chief Justice William Howard Taft warned that Congress could seize control of “the great number of subjects” reserved to the states by the 10th Amendment by imposing a “so-called tax” on any behavior it disapproved: “To give such magic to the word ‘tax’ would be to break down all constitutional limitation of the powers of Congress and completely wipe out the sovereignty of the states.”

So, a 1934 law imposed a $200 tax on the making and transfer of certain guns. Supreme Court Justice Harlan Fiske Stone complacently said that any act of Congress “which, on its face, purports to be an exercise of the taxing power,” should be treated as such, without judicial inquiring into any “hidden motives” Congress had. “Hidden”?

Congress responded to this “abdication of judicial scrutiny” (Kopel’s and Burrus’ correct characterization) with the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act, another supposed tax law actually designed not to raise revenue but to legislate morality by changing behavior. The 1951 Revenue Act taxed “persons engaged in the business of accepting wagers” and required them “to register with the Collector of Internal Revenue.” The IRS was becoming the enforcer of laws to make Americans better behaved, as judged by their betters in the federal government.

There have been equally spurious uses of Congress’ enumerated power to regulate interstate commerce. In 1903, the court upheld, as a valid exercise of that power, a law suppressing lotteries by banning the interstate transportation of lottery tickets. Dissenting, Chief Justice Melville Fuller argued that the power to regulate persons and property in order to promote “the public health” and “good order” belongs to the states.

Seven years later, the Commerce Clause was the rationale for the Mann Act banning the transportation of females for the purpose of “prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” Including, it turned out, noncommercial, consensual sex involving no unhappy victim.

Today, Congress exercises police powers never granted by the Constitution. Conservatives who favor federal “wars” on drugs, gambling and other behaviors should understand the damage they have done to the constitutional underpinnings of limited government.

Texting while driving is dangerous, especially if you are driving a train. A commuter train engineer was texting on Sept. 12, 2008, near Los Angeles, when he missed a stop signal and crashed into a freight train. Twenty-five people died.

Congress supposedly is incapable of acting quickly, and we are supposed to regret this. In 2008, however, Congress acted with dispatch. We should regret that it did. Herewith another lesson about the costs of the regulatory state, especially when it is excited, eager to make a gesture, and propelled by an uninformed consensus.

On Jan. 6, 2005, nine people had been killed in Graniteville, S.C., by chlorine gas leaking from a derailed freight train, but Congress did not spring into action. In 2008, however, California’s 53-person congressional delegation was 12 percent of the House, and 24 percent of a House majority. So in less than a month after the commuter train collision, Congress, with scant opposition from railroads, and without meaningful cost-benefit analyses, passed legislation requiring most railroads to implement, by 2015, Positive Train Control (PTC), a technology to stop trains by overriding some human mistakes.

So far, railroads have spent more than $2.7 billion on a system estimated to cost $10 billion to $14 billion — plus perhaps $1 billion in annual maintenance. PTC has not been installed, partly because it is not sufficiently developed. CSX Corp., which includes railroads among its assets, says the railroad industry is the nation’s most capital-intensive — and the $11 billion combined capital investments of all U.S. railroads in 2010 were approximately equal to the cost of PTC. The 2015 mandate will not be met.

The Federal Railroad Administration estimates that were PTC to be installed on thousands of locomotives and tens of thousands of miles of track, it would prevent perhaps 2 percent of the approximately 2,000 collisions and derailments, preventing seven deaths and 22 injuries annually. But because a dollar spent on X cannot be spent on Y, the PTC mandate must mean the sacrifice of other investments crucial to railroad safety (and efficiency).

Before returning to Harvard Law School, Cass Sunstein was Barack Obama’s administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, measuring the benefits of regulations against their costs. Testifying to a House subcommittee on Jan. 26, 2011, Sunstein was asked if he could identify an administration regulation whose “benefits have not justified the cost.” He replied:
“There is only one big one that comes to mind. It is called Positive Train Control, and it is a statutory requirement, and the Department of Transportation had to issue it as a matter of law even though the monetizable benefits are lower than the monetizable costs. There aren’t a lot like that.”

In 2012, the index was 29, meaning that 29 times more regulations were issued by agencies than there were laws passed by Congress

Concerning Sunstein’s sanguine conclusion, skepticism is permitted. Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute has recently published his “Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State.” This year’s 20th-anniversary edition notes that regulation, the “hidden tax,” costs almost $2 trillion not counted among the official federal outlays. Using mostly government data, Crews concludes:

The cost of regulations ($1.806 trillion) is now more than half the size of the federal budget and 11.6 percent of GDP. This costs $14,768 per U.S. household, equal to 23 percent of the average household income of $63,685. Regulatory compliance costs exceed the combined sum of income taxes paid by corporations ($237 billion) and individuals ($1.165 trillion). Then add $61 billion in on-budget spending by agencies that administer regulations.

Crews’ “Anti-Democracy Index” measures “the ratio of regulations issued by agencies relative to laws passed by Congress.” In 2012, the index was 29, meaning that 29 times more regulations were issued by agencies than there were laws passed by Congress. “This disparity,” Crews writes, “highlights a substantial delegation of lawmaking power to unelected agency officials.”
Congress relishes such delegation of lawmaking because responsibility is time-consuming and potentially hazardous politically. Hence the Senate refuses to pass legislation the House passed in 2011 to require Congress to vote approval of any “major” regulation, defined as any with an economic impact of $100 million or more. If Congress were more clearly responsible for burdening the economy with such regulations, it would be less likely to pass them as sincerity gestures.
Internal Revenue Service misbehavior in the regulation of political advocacy, combined with the imminent expansion of the IRS to enable it to administer the coercions that are Obamacare, is sensitizing Americans to some of the costs of the regulatory state. There are many others, hidden but huge.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, chairman of the Financial Services Committee, has told Richard Cordray not to bother. This is part of the recent evidence that government is getting some adult supervision.

Barack Obama used a recess appointment to make Cordray director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But a federal circuit court has declared unconstitutional three other recess appointments made the same day because the Senate was not in recess. So Hensarling has told Cordray not to testify before his committee: “Absent contrary guidance from the United States Supreme Court, you do not meet the statutory requirements of a validly serving director of the CFPB, and cannot be recognized as such.”

Last week the Federal Aviation Administration promoted chaos in travel by furloughing air traffic controllers, supposedly because the sequester cuts — 4 percent of its budget — cannot be otherwise implemented. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., notes that the FAA says its 15,000 air traffic controllers must be furloughed in the same proportion as its 32,000 other employees, who include librarians, historians, speechwriters, PR people, congressional and White House liaisons, and many others perhaps less essential to the FAA’s primary mission than are people in O’Hare’s control tower.

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On Friday, the eve of its recess, Congress fixed this problem, explicitly granting the FAA flexibility it already had. Then the legislators dashed to Washington’s airports. Amazing, the dispatch with which the government acts when its stupidities inconvenience the rulers as much as the ruled.

The rest of the sequester will still be administered so as to make the government as painful as possible to the public, in the hope that the public will support more spending by and for the government. Obama may think his powers of persuasion can convince people that as chief executive he is a mere bystander in this executive branch sadism. But about those powers …

In 2009, he flew to Copenhagen to give a speech about himself (he referred to himself 26 times in 48 sentences), expecting this to enchant the International Olympic Committee into awarding Chicago the 2016 games. Unenthralled, the committee made Chicago the first city eliminated from the competition.

Since then, Obama has campaigned for Obamacare without making it popular and against Republican candidates without success in 2010. Still, his faith in the potent ointment of his words is probably unshaken by even the failure of his barnstorming in support of gun legislation almost weirdly unrelated to the event — Newtown — to which it was supposedly a response.

Last week, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., chairman of the Finance Committee, announced he will not seek a seventh term next year. Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., Baucus’ tax-writing counterpart, is term-limited by Republican rules as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. So the two most important people in the most urgent legislative project — tax reform to ignite economic growth — have parallel incentives to work quickly. And if Democrats still control the Senate in 2015, Finance, the Senate’s most important committee, probably will be chaired by Oregon’s Ron Wyden, who has the intellectual power and political independence of such previous Democratic luminaries on Finance as Louisiana’s Russell Long, Texas’ Lloyd Bentsen and New York’s Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

In a burst of the bipartisanship we are told to revere, a coalition of Republican and Democratic senators rose above party differences last week to affirm class solidarity. They moved toward a tax increase of at least $22 billion to benefit the political class at the state and local levels. Because Baucus opposes the legislation to enrich state and local governments by subjecting Internet commerce to state and local sales taxes, Majority Leader Harry Reid brought it directly to the floor, bypassing the Finance Committee. One reason the Republican-controlled House should reject this tax increase is that much of the revenue will be passed on to public employees and, through their unions, to Democrats’ campaigns.

Finally, last week Earth Day passed with less notice than was given to the approaching death of another planet-saver, Fisker Automotive Inc. The electric car maker’s slide toward Solyndra-style bankruptcy has been greased with $192 million in government loans. Fisker is a redundant demonstration of the government’s incompetence as a venture capitalist, and of the decay of environmentalism into cranky gestures. Although electric cars are 40 percent powered by coal, that being the percentage of U.S. electricity generated by coal, Fisker was supposed to combat global warming, of which there has been essentially none for 15 years. As adult supervision returns, Washington may take seriously the bad news about its harebrained green investments and the good news that refutes the argument for more of them.

Friday was the day that the famous Washington sequester went into effect, slicing 2% from a range of U.S. domestic and defence programs.

The sequester (or “sequestration” if you are a stickler for correct English usage, unlike most D.C. pols and pundits) will cut $42.7-billion from the U.S. defence budget in what remains of the 2013 fiscal year, with more cuts to follow in 2014. (All budget figures in U.S. dollars.)

How much money is $42.7-billion? Given that the total defence budget exceeds $683-billion, you might be tempted to shrug it off. But the cuts will bite harder than you might think.

Pre-sequester, the defence budget was already scheduled for half a trillion in budget cuts over the decade ahead. Among other real-world effects, the U.S. military expects to field 100,000 fewer soldiers, sailors, aircrew and Marines in 2017 than today.

Meanwhile, budget cuts or no budget cuts, the military budget is being hollowed out from within by rising military health costs. Over the past decade, the military’s health-care costs have tripled, surging from $19-billion in 2001 to $53-billion in 2011. Health costs are projected to rise to $63.9-billion by 2015. An additional 6% cut atop those previous problems begins to look like a serious challenge to readiness and effectiveness.

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Yet this serious challenge is not being taken seriously by the very people you’d most expect to be concerned. According to a Gallup poll released last week, 80% of self-identified Republicans feel it is very important for the U.S. to have the world’s strongest military. Only 48% of self-identified Democrats think so, as opposed to 51% of Democrats who say military predominance is “not that important.”

In Washington, however, it is the Republicans who are behaving cavalierly about the defence budget.

The sequester originated as part of the escape plan from the 2011 debt-ceiling crisis. The idea was that the President and House Republicans would try to negotiate a long-term deficit reduction plan. To concentrate their minds, they agreed that something nasty would happen if they failed to reach a deal. The sequester was that “something nasty.” Democrats would face budget cuts to cherished domestic programs; Republicans would face … well, originally they would face automatic tax increases. But when push came to shove, Republicans decided that tax increases were so utterly unacceptable to them that they could not even be put into law as a contingency. They substituted instead defence cuts as their “something nasty.”

The trouble is that the new Tea Party congressional GOP no longer minds defence cuts as much as it used to — or as much as the rank-and-file Republicans surveyed by Gallup. Congressional Republicans increasingly welcome the sequester as a good thing, or anyway, an acceptable thing.

According to Representative Steve Scalise, Republican of Louisiana and chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee: “[This] shows we’re finally willing to stand and fight for conservative principles and force Washington to start living within its means. And that will be a big victory.”

It should be stressed: The Republican Study Committee is an important group within the Republican caucus. These are not Ron Paul style isolationists, but mainstream conservatives. Unfortunately, mainstream conservatives are increasingly willing to risk national security to score points in the Washington partisan competition.

Americans sense the decline in their country’s strength. Gallup finds that only 50% now express confidence that the U.S. military ranks number one, the lowest number since the end of the Cold War. Such pessimism is exaggerated of course. But it’s not completely ill-founded. Not since the 1970s has Congress taken the kind of risks with national security that it seems ready to incur today.

And of course when Congress does take such risks, it is not only Americans who are endangered. A great democratic world order has grown up under American protection. As America retreats, that protection is withdrawn. The democratic world order shrinks. New challengers and competitors are emboldened. It’s a high stake to wager in a grubby game of D.C. political poker.

WASHINGTON — Facing an end of the week deadline, President Barack Obama said Monday that Congress can avert sweeping across-the-board cuts with “just a little bit of compromise,” as he sought to stick lawmakers with the blame if the budget ax falls.

Speaking to the nation’s governors, Obama acknowledged that the impact of the $85 billion in cuts may not be felt immediately. But he also said the uncertainty already is impacting the economy, as the Pentagon and other agencies get ready to furlough employees.

“At some point we’ve got to do some governing,” Obama said. “And certainly what we can’t do is keep careening from manufactured crisis to manufactured crisis.”

Despite Obama’s urgent rhetoric, there is no indication that the White House and Congress were negotiating a deal to avoid cuts by Friday’s deadline. White House press secretary Jay Carney said he had no new telephone calls to announce since the president’s conversations with Republican congressional leaders last week.

Obama wants to offset the so-called sequester through a combination of targeted spending cuts and revenue increases, but Republicans oppose any plan that would include tax hikes.

Emerging from a closed-door meeting with Obama, governors said the president had assured the administration is pursuing solutions, but didn’t offer assurances that officials would find a way ahead out ahead of the deadline.

The $85 billion budget-cutting mechanism could affect everything from commercial flights to classrooms to meat inspections. Domestic and defense spending alike would be trimmed, leading to furloughs for hundreds of thousands of government workers and contractors.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has said the cuts would harm the readiness of U.S. fighting forces. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said travelers could see delayed flights. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said 70,000 fewer children from low-income families would have access to Head Start programs. And furloughed meat inspectors could leave plants idled.

The White House continued laying out in stark terms what the cuts would mean for government services, dispatching Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to warn of the implications for critical security functions.

“I don’t think we can maintain the same level of security at all places around the country with sequester as without sequester,” said Napolitano, adding that the impact would be “`like a rolling ball. It will keep growing.”

Despite the Friday deadline, there are no serious negotiations happening between the White House and Congress. Obama is focused instead are trying to rally public support for his stance in the debate by warning Americans of the dire consequences of the across-the-board cuts.

The president told the governors that cuts would “`’slow our economy, eliminate good jobs, and leave a lot of folks who are already pretty thinly stretched scrambling to figure out what to do.”

The spending cuts have frustrated governors attending the National Governors Association meeting in Washington. They contend it has created widespread uncertainty in the economy and hampered economic recovery in their states.

“The president needs to show leadership,” said Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican considered a potential 2016 presidential contender, outside the West Wing. “The reality is it can be done. This administration has an insatiable appetite for new revenue.”

Democratic governors, meanwhile, laid responsibility squarely at the feet of Congress, but called on lawmakers from both parties to compromise.

“They need to get out of that box that sits under the dome and understand that this has real implications in people’s lives,” said Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy. “Work with the president, find a way to get it done — or if you want, just turn it over to us governors, and we’ll negotiate.”

The White House, seeking to ratchet up pressure on congressional lawmakers, gave the governors state-by-state reports on the impact of the cuts on their constituencies.

White House officials pointed to Ohio — home of House Speaker John Boehner — as one state that would be hit hard: $25.1 million in education spending and another $22 million for students with disabilities. Some 2,500 children from low-income families would also be removed from Head Start programs.

Officials said their analysis showed Kentucky would lose $93,000 in federal funding for a domestic abuse program, meaning 400 fewer victims being served in Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s home state. Georgia, meanwhile, would face a $286,000 budget cut to its children’s health programs, meaning almost 4,200 fewer children would receive vaccinations against measles and whooping cough.

The White House compiled its state-by-state reports from federal agencies and its own budget office. The numbers reflect the impact of the cuts this year. Unless Congress acts by Friday, $85 billion in cuts are set to take effect from March to September.

As to whether states could move money around to cover shortfalls, the White House said that depends on state budget structures and the specific programs. The White House did not have a list of which states or programs might have flexibility.

Republican leaders were not impressed by the state-by-state reports.

“It’s time for the White House to stop spending all its time campaigning, and start finding smarter ways to reduce the deficit,” said McConnell.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/obama-urges-congress-to-compromise-a-little-bit-to-avoid-sweeping-budget-cuts/feed0stdElectoral College tie could end in a Romney/Biden administrationhttp://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/electoral-college-tie-could-end-in-a-romneybiden-administration
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/electoral-college-tie-could-end-in-a-romneybiden-administration#commentsMon, 22 Oct 2012 14:44:06 +0000http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/?p=94687

David Frum, at the Daily Beast, raises the issue of what happens should Barack Obama and Mitt Romney come to the close of election night still stuck in a tie.

It’s not inconceivable, given the current breakdown of battleground states and the votes they carry in the electoral college. That raises the frightening prospect of Romney being handed the decision thanks to the Republican domination of the House of Representatives, even if Obama happens to win the popular vote.

This moves us beyond Bush v. Gore territory into someplace even more contested and more frightening. And whereas 2000 was a low-intensity election involving a Democratic not hugely beloved by his own party base, a House contest in 2012 would unleash every passion in the American political system.

As a measure of how close the U.S. is to that nightmare scenario, current estimates of electoral college standings put the contest near a dead heat:

The Washington Post, which has Obama ahead 255 votes to 206, with 77 “toss-up” votes left, offers five scenarios in which a tie could emerge, depending on how the battleground states vote.

If somehow, though, we got to a 269-vote tie, the task of electing the president would fall to the House of Representatives — the new one that will assume office in January. According to the 12th Amendment, each state delegation would cast one vote, with the winner determined by whoever wins more states.

Since we don’t know exactly what the House will look like, we can’t say with certainty who would have the edge. But it’s very unlikely that an Electoral College tie would wind up in Obama’s favor.

The Washington Examiner, just to add to the potential horror, notes that a separate congressional vote would have to be held for the vice-president, only it would be held in the Senate, which Democrats control. Which could result in Romney as president, with Democrat Joe Biden as his vice-president. It’s even possible that, in a tied Senate, Biden could end up casting the deciding vote in his own favour.

It would probably be the most dysfunctional government in human history, with Vice President Biden essentially running an Avignon Papacy from Number One Observatory Circle. It would probably be hilarious to watch, but also awful. (Though Thomas Friedman will write a hundred columns about the tremendous opportunity for “bipartisan civility” that America has just been handed.)

It may sound far-fetched, but who thought “hanging chads” in Florida would help decide whether Al Gore or George Bush became president in 2000?

SALT LAKE CITY — A specter is haunting the Congressional Black Caucus, the specter of integration. It is discomforting enough that the now 43-member caucus has included a Republican since 2011, when Florida’s Allen West became the first Republican to join the caucus since 1997. South Carolina’s Tim Scott, an African-American, also came to Congress in 2011 but declined to join.

And soon a second might move in. There goes the neighborhood.

Mia Love, 37, is running against incumbent Democrat Jim Matheson, 52, in a district created when the 2010 census gave a fourth representative to this booming state — imagine Utah’s growth if the federal government did not own 58 percent of the land.

Love is black but not African-American. She was born in Brooklyn in 1975 to Haitian immigrants who arrived with $10. On her father’s wages as a janitor and a factory worker and her mother’s as a housekeeper, she got through the University of Hartford. In Connecticut, she met her husband — he is a Mormon, as she now is and 62 percent of Utahans are.

Fourteen years ago, they moved to this state, where blacks were about 1 percent of the population before Love arrived and had three children. In 2009, she was elected mayor of Saratoga Springs, a suburb of 18,000 that grew 1,700 percent between its incorporation in 1997 and the housing crash in 2008, after which Mayor Love governed like this: When constituents said they needed a library, she found $10,000 and suggested volunteers do the rest: “I intended to see if they really wanted a library.” They have one.

Two-thirds of the voters in the new district have never voted for Matheson, whose home is not in the district. There is, however, no constitutional requirement that a representative live where he runs, and as a sixth-generation Utahan, and the son of a popular two-term governor, he has considerable strengths as he seeks a seventh term.

Utah may be the most Republican state, and Matheson is one of the Democratic congressmen representing especially Republican districts. But Utah has seemed to like having a token Democrat in its delegation in Washington, where Matheson, after graduating from Harvard, worked for Speaker Tip O’Neill. Matheson is a member of the dwindling Blue Dog caucus of moderate Democrats, and voted against Obamacare, cap-and-trade and the DREAM Act immigration measure for children of illegal immigrants. This year he voted to repeal Obamacare (previously he voted against that) but has announced he will vote for Barack Obama.

Love is energetic and eclectically principled: If elected, she surely will be the only House member whose Kindle contains works by Frederic Bastiat, the French free-market thinker who in a satirical 1845 letter asked France’s parliament to protect candle makers:

“We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price. … This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us. … We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights. … “

In this, one of the most racially and culturally homogenous states, the only uninteresting thing about Love is that she is black. This is not just progress, it is the destination toward which progress was directed during the brisk march to today’s healthy indifference to the fact that Love would be the first black Republican woman ever in the House. Some “stalemate.”

In March 2008, in the speech ostensibly explaining the inexplicable — his 20 years in the pews of the raving Rev. Jeremiah Wright — candidate Barack Obama referred to “a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years.” Hardly.

He was then eight months from winning 43 percent of the white vote — two points more than John Kerry won four years earlier. Obama carried three states — three more than Kerry — of the Confederacy (Florida, Virginia and North Carolina). In states outside the South, Obama received substantially more white votes than any Democratic candidate since Lyndon Johnson in 1964 — more than Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton or Al Gore. This is part of the “racial stalemate” in which Mississippi has more black elected officials — not more relative to population; more — than any other state.

Throughout the bitter battle in Congress this year over the Keystone XL pipeline, no Republican had harsher words for U.S. President Barack Obama than Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar.

In a speech from the floor of the Senate chamber in March, the six-term legislator accused Mr. Obama of having “caved to pressure from extreme environmentalists” when he denied a permit for the oilsands project. The decision was evidence, Mr. Lugar said, that Mr. Obama “prefers to send billions of dollars to unfriendly regimes rather than expanding trade with Canada.”

Hyperbole? Yes. Partisan? Absolutely. Mr. Lugar’s been around Capitol Hill long enough to know how – and when – to pick a good political fight with the White House.

But Mr. Lugar, a GOP lion who was first elected in 1976, has also been around long enough to know when it is time to lay down swords and cut a deal with the opposing team.

That willingness to compromise, a quality in increasingly short supply in U.S. politics, explains why Mr. Lugar won’t be around much longer.

The third most senior member of the Senate, Mr. Lugar saw his career come to an abrupt end last week when he lost the Republican primary for the 2012 election to Richard Mourdock, Indiana’s state treasurer.

Among moderate Republicans and Democrats in Congress, Mr. Lugar’s defeat was a watershed moment – a tipping point where the rigid ideology on the GOP right finally trumped a more pragmatic style of conservative politics.

Mr. Lugar’s sin(s)? As reliable a Republican as he was on most issues, the longtime senator had the audacity to vote with Democrats on some of the most consequential issues of the past four years.

Mr. Lugar backed the bailout of the U.S. auto industry. He voted for the Wall Street rescue at a time when president George W. Bush warned its defeat could lead to the collapse of the U.S. economy. Foolhardy, indeed.

Perhaps most damning of all, in the minds of GOP Tea Party activists, Mr. Lugar voted to confirm two of Mr. Obama’s Supreme Court nominees, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.

Taken together, these votes amounted to heresy in America’s current political climate, where bipartisanship is a dirty word and Republicans and Democrats succeed most with their grassroots when they cooperate least on Capitol Hill.

Who do Indiana Republicans feel will fit in better in today’s Washington?

Mr. Mourdock has run for national office three times – in 1988, 1990 and 1992 – and lost each time. Even as polls show Americans feel Congress is hopelessly dysfunctional, Mr. Mourdock wants to make it worse.

“What I’ve said is that I certainly think bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view. Bipartisanship means they have to come our way,” he told NBC News.

“The highlight of politics, frankly, is to inflict my opinion on someone else with a microphone or in front of a camera.”
Inflict. What an interesting choice of words.

Mr. Lugar’s defeat came on the heels of a decision by Maine senator Olympia Snowe to throw in the towel on her own three-term career.

“I see a vital need for the political centre in order for our democracy to flourish and to find solutions that unite rather than divide us,” Ms. Snowe said upon announcing she wouldn’t run again.

In the Rush Limbaugh wing of the GOP, the general reaction to Mr. Lugar’s and Ms. Snowe’s departure has been to say “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

But Democrats may have the last laugh.

For much of 2012, it’s been presumed Democrats would lose their Senate majority this fall. But with every moderate Republican kicked to the curb, Democrats feel their chances of picking up seats improve in places like Indiana and Maine. While candidates such as Richard Mourdock say they believe the problem with Congress lies in too much compromise, the reality is that nothing gets done in American politics without it.

The really big things that need to be done over the next several years – entitlement reform, deficit reduction – simply cannot be achieved without members of both parties swallowing hard and jumping off the cliff together.

Even in a Congress where Republicans hold majorities in the Senate and House, “my way or the highway” doesn’t work if a Democratic president holds the veto pen.

Richard Mourdock doesn’t understand this. But Richard Lugar does. Mr. Mourdock “has pledged his support to groups whose mission is to cleanse the Republican party of those who stray from orthodoxy as they see it,” Mr. Lugar said following his primary defeat.

“This is not conducive to problem-solving and governance. And he will find that unless he modifies his approach, he will achieve little as a legislator. Worse, he will help delay solutions that are totally beyond the capacity of partisan majorities to achieve.”
Wise words. If only they could be heard above the shouting.

WASHINGTON — Threatening letters containing a suspicious powdery substance, which so far has been found to be harmless, have been sent to a growing number of state offices of U.S. lawmakers, a top congressional law enforcement official said on Thursday.

Senate Sergeant at Arms Terrance Gainer said in an update to staff that several more Senate state offices had received threatening mail containing the suspicious powder.

The update followed a notice on Wednesday saying a number of members of Congress, including House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner, had received the letters that threatened a biological attack and contained a suspicious powder that tests found was harmless.

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“While none of the mail received and tested thus far has been found to be harmful, it is clear that the person sending these letters is organized and committed, and the potential to do harm remains very real,” Gainer said.

In 2001, deadly anthrax-laced letters were sent to several news organizations and Senate offices. Five people were killed and 17 sickened from the letters that went out as the country was reeling from the Sept. 11 attacks.

Gainer told congressional staff to remain vigilant even though tests showed the substance contained in the letters received by offices had so far been shown to be harmless.

Gainer said some of the latest letters shared the same return address as those that showed up on Wednesday. Others had a different address but were posted in the same Pacific Northwest region.

On Wednesday, officials said a number of media organizations and TV shows, including The New York Times and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, had also received mail, which was postmarked from Oregon. The sender warned that letters had been sent to the Washington or local offices of all 100 U.S. senators and that 10 contained a deadly pathogen, a law enforcement source said.

Gainer said Capitol law enforcement officials were working closely with federal and local law enforcement in an investigation into the mail.

WASHINGTON — Congress on Friday passed legislation extending a tax cut for 160 million workers through December and continuing long-term jobless benefits, handing President Barack Obama a major victory in this election year.

In two quick bipartisan votes, the House of Representatives passed the measure 293-132, and minutes later the Senate passed it 60-36.

The legislation now goes to Obama, who is expected to sign it into law promptly.

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But significant numbers of Republicans in both chambers voted against the bill, laying bare deep divisions within the party over an issue that they have struggled with for months and threatening to hurt their 2012 electoral prospects.

The measure, while adding $100 billion to the already high U.S. deficit, is aimed at further stimulating the economy at a time it is showing some positive signs. A sustained recovery would play well for Obama in his re-election bid in November.

The votes capped a fever-pitch debate in Congress that began in earnest in November. Democrats argued the legislation would help spur the economy and provide needed cash to struggling middle class families and workers, and to those who have been unable to find jobs amid an 8.3 percent unemployment rate.

Republicans have staked out a series of changing positions as they questioned the effectiveness of the tax cut. But their leaders ultimately saw that blocking the legislation would hurt them in November’s congressional and presidential elections, especially as they were protecting tax cuts for the wealthy.

As a result, Republican leaders threw their weight behind the initiative to get it enacted and then take it off the political agenda.

After a full year of pushing controversial measures to reduce government budget deficits that have been topping $1 trillion annually, many Republicans on Friday found themselves voting for a measure that adds $100 billion to the deficit.

A significant number – 91 of the 242 House Republicans -abandoned House Speaker John Boehner and voted against the bill. Only 14 of 47 Senate Republicans voted yes.

In defending the payroll tax cut, which was not offset by spending cuts or a tax increase on millionaires as Democrats sought, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi turned to a conventional Republican argument that tax cuts end up paying for themselves by helping boost economic growth. The payroll tax cut, Pelosi said, “stimulates the economy by injecting demand and creating more jobs.”

RARE BIPARTISANSHIP

Friday’s vote also was a rare show of bipartisanship in the House – one that is not likely to last long – as Democrats and Republicans are expected to quickly return to bickering over a major highway funding bill and next year’s budget.

Without the legislation, the 4.2 percent tax workers pay to fund the Social Security retirement program would have snapped back to its normal 6.2 percent on March 1. Instead, the average working family will now have about $1,000 in extra cash this year, money Obama hopes they will spend to help grow the economy.

Without this legislation, millions of the long-term unemployed would have lost benefit checks that help them buy groceries, gasoline and other basic goods.

Representative Joe Barton of Texas, a Republican member of the Tea Party Caucus, opposed the bill, saying, “We are taking money away from the Social Security Trust Fund and we’re substituting an IOU that may or may not ever be repaid.”

The bill also averts through 2012 a 27 percent cut in payments to doctors who treat elderly Medicare healthcare patients.

Republicans won some reforms to the unemployment insurance program – mainly a cut in the maximum number of jobless benefit checks, to 73 weeks by year’s end from the current 99 weeks.

The communications industry secured access to more public airwaves, as selling off these government-owned “spectrum” rights was a major revenue raising tool to help offset the cost of the jobless benefits.

But federal workers, a punching bag for small-government Tea Party movement activists, would take another hit after two years of pay freezes. Pension benefits for newly-hired workers would be cut to help pay for some costs of the bill.

“Stop singling them out and making them scapegoats,” said Democratic Representative Chris Van Hollen, who represents many federal workers living in suburban Maryland just outside of Washington, D.C. “They had nothing to do with the financial meltdown on Wall Street; they are not the drivers of national debt,” he added.

Had the payroll tax cut and long-term jobless benefits been allowed to expire on February 29, that would have shaved a 0.7 percent point off of economic growth this year, according to Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi.

WASHINGTON, Feb 16 (Reuters) – Democratic and Republican leaders rallied support on Thursday in a divided U.S. Congress for a bipartisan deal to renew a payroll tax cut for 160 million U.S. workers through the November elections.

The agreement represents a victory for President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats in Congress, and allows Republicans to put behind them a battle over taxes that threatened to hurt them in the November elections.

While negotiators worked to put the accord into legislative language so it can be brought up for votes in the Republican-led House of Representatives and Democratic-led Senate this week, leading members of both parties said it deserves to become law.

House Speaker John Boehner, the top U.S. Republican, said the agreement reached by congressional negotiators was “fair” and was needed to counter Obama’s “failed” economic policies.

Related

“Let’s be honest, this is an economic relief package, not a bill that will grow the economy and create jobs,” Boehner said.

But many House Republicans aligned with the small-government Tea Party movement are upset that Boehner agreed to add $100 billion to the record U.S. debt by dropping a demand that the tax cut extension be paid for with spending reductions.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said Democrats would back the package even though she did not like some of its cost-saving measures, particularly one that would require federal workers to pay more into their pensions.

“I don’t see a scenario where our members would vote against it,” Pelosi said at a news conference.

The accord would also renew expiring jobless benefits for millions of long-term unemployed and prevent a pay cut for doctors of elderly Medicare patients. Congressional leaders hope to pass the legislation and send it to the president before lawmakers leave for a recess set for next week.

Economists say the tax cut extension and renewal of jobless benefits should give a lift to the U.S. economy, certain to be a key issue in the battle for control of Congress and the White House in Nov. 6 elections.

Congressional leaders announced the deal early Thursday morning after lengthy, difficult negotiations.

“Everything should not have to be a fight, and I am glad that most of my Republican colleagues put the interests of the middle class ahead of politics to forge this agreement,” Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said in a statement.

LATE NIGHT

The late night announcement of an agreement by lead negotiators Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, a Democrat, and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, a Republican, capped a long day of political drama.

At one point, the deal seemed in jeopardy just hours after aides said it had been struck. Democrats complained that Senate Republicans were suddenly demanding that a new restriction on physician-owned hospitals had to be eased to gain their support.

Aides said some Democratic negotiators were also reluctant to sign off on the deal because of cuts in the pensions of federal workers.

The overarching issue, however, was the proposed extension for 10 months of the payroll tax cut set to expire on Feb. 29.

Many Republicans had initially balked at the extension while others insisted that its cost had to be offset by spending cuts to prevent an increase in the U.S. deficit.

But their positions drew fire from many Republicans who argued that one of the party’s core principles was advocating lower taxes and that blocking a tax-cut extension could rile voters ahead of the November elections.

Boehner and fellow Republican leaders cleared the way for a deal on Monday when they dropped their demand for spending reductions to pay for the tax-cut extension.

The payroll tax was first reduced from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent in the beginning of 2011 at the request of Obama as part of his bid to stimulate the economy.

The new deal would continue the 4.2 percent rate until the end of this year, during which it is projected to put an additional $1,000 in the pockets of the average American working family.

Analysts said opinion polls showing public disgust with a gridlocked Congress may have helped drive lawmakers, many of whom face tough re-election contests, toward a deal.

If Newt Gingrich needed a handy example to back up his contention that a pack of comfortable leftwingers who dominate the mainstream U.S. media habitually filter news coverage through the prism of their one agenda, the furor over the Susan G. Komen Foundation may have just provided it.

The Foundation is the biggest U.S. breast cancer charity, which has spent almost $2 billion since 1982 paying for mammograms and financing research into breast cancer. It suddenly found itself under fierce attack, however, when it announced it would cut off $680,000 in funding for Planned Parenthood, which is disliked by U.S. conservative groups because it helps people get abortions. The Foundation said an internal policy bars it from funding organizations that are under investigation by Congress. Handily enough, a Congressional subcommittee headed by a Florida Republican is looking into whether Planned Parenthood uses federal funds to pay for abortions.

Komen’s decision was treated as a thinly-veiled attack on the forces of Choice and sparked an immediate reaction. Celebrities, pro-Choice groups, social media, well-financed activists and armies of commentators weighed in, overwhelmingly condemning the decision. The charity’s bosses, apparently caught by surprise, were crushed under the onslaught. They tried changing their story, but when that failed, quickly cut their losses, issued a blanket apology and reversed the decision. Planned Parenthood can now use its money for anything it feels like, as far as the Komen folks are concerned.

So everything’s fine now. Except, in the aftermath, there are questions being asked about coverage of the affair, and whether the media inadvertently displayed its overwhelming bias in favour of the Choice people.

The Daily Beast‘s Howard Kurtz, one of the country’s best-known media observers, declared there was no question about it: the MSM took sides, and forced the charity to back down:

The conventional narrative is that Komen’s supporters rose up in unison, but it was the big news organizations that turned up the heat until the breast cancer organization had no choice but to melt. The original eruption occurred on Facebook and Twitter, but it was the mainstream media that provided the megaphone.

Komen executives handled the situation horribly, with shifting explanations to cover for the agenda of the woman who led the effort to defund Planned Parenthood, a former pro-life candidate for Georgia governor named Karen Handel. It was a PR debacle, badly handled.

But still: Regardless of one’s views on abortion, there is no getting around the fact that the media approached the controversy from a liberal perspective. Yanking money from Planned Parenthood, which provides abortions as well as mammograms, was deemed the “political” decision; funding the organization was not.

The Mercury News, a Silicon Valley publication, gave an example of the tenor of the coverage in a fire-breathing editorial that portrayed the charity’s move as a heartless assault on the impoverished.

The national Komen organization earlier in the week had cut off funding for Planned Parenthood’s breast cancer exams for poor women, using the excuse of a sham congressional investigation into the agency, a minuscule portion of whose work involves abortions. If just declaring an investigation of a charity were accepted as cause for denying funding, then any wing-nut lawmaker could cripple any cause on a whim.

Columnist Gail Collins, in the New York Times, noted ruefully that the clash showed absolutely anything can now be turned into a clash of political ideologies.

This week we had a huge political fight about breast cancer. Clearly, we have now hit the point where there’s nothing that can’t be divided into red-state-blue-state….

Breast cancer would seem like the last thing to go. Everybody hates cancer and everybody likes breasts — infants, adults, women, men. Really, it’s America’s most popular body part. The Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation has made its fight against breast cancer into one of the most successful charitable enterprises in recent history, partly because it makes everybody feel good and helps corporate sponsors create good will.

For Planned Parenthood, everything would seem to have worked out great: the furor produced a spike in donations that brought in an extra $3 million, about five times the Komen grant. But Peter Roff at U.S. News & World Reportdecried the scorched-earth attitude of the pro-Choice forces and their intolerance of dissent.

It’s not enough for them that Komen has returned to the status quo ante position; they must now make an act of contrition, to promise to keep the money flowing no matter what and, apparently, to fire the employee the feminocracy has fingered as the person responsible for the policy change.

If this is about women’s health it is only tangentially so. It’s really about the requirement for orthodoxy where abortion is concerned. The feminocracy cannot allow any organization involved in the women’s health issue to be seen to be breaking ranks on the issue of legal abortion. They cannot allow for freedom of thought or freedom of conscience lest the hegemony of their position among the cultural elites be jeopardized.

A key goal of the Tea Party when it stormed into Washington was to bring down Barack Obama, on the theory that the President was a failure and they were there to fix things.

But barely 15 months since those mid-term elections, the Tea Party itself has little to chalk up in the way of success, unless you count bringing the business of Congress to a grinding halt. With nine months to go before the next round in the never-ending U.S. election cycle, Congress is less popular than ever, American government is derided as dysfunctional, and Republicans spend more time attacking one another than they do the Democrats.

Mitt Romney, the favourite to win the nomination to face Obama in November, spent $15 million last month just on TV ads denouncing Newt Gingrich, his closest competitor. Gingrich, running as an outsider from both Washington (where he spent his entire career) and his own party (of which he used to be Speaker), now includes Republican party leaders among the enemy elites he says are out to destroy him. Former Republican nominees and party heavyweights are lined up to block him from knocking off Romney, but he says he’ll stick to it to the bitter end, even if it means cleaving the party in two.

The fact that Gingrich is the Tea Party’s favoured candidate demonstrates how diminished its clout has become. Alarmed at the damage caused by Republicans’ internal divisions, Speaker John Boehner and House majority leader Eric Cantor publicly declared a truce between their warring factions. Cantor’s Tea Party enthusiasts view Boehner as a old-guard moderate, and their respective staffs viewed one another as rivals rather than allies in the war against the White House. So open was the hostility, that Obama felt safe in mocking the rivalry during a recent appearance, joking that Boehner had outfoxed Cantor in gaining a seat at the head table.

Far from the revolutionary reforms the Tea Partiers vowed to impose on Washington, the capital seems less effective than ever. The partiers most notorious achievement was to turn Obama’s request for a higher borrowing limit — usually a routine affair — into a near-death experience which brought the country to the brink of defaulting on its debts. Though further weakening Obama’s image, the stunt was far more damaging to Congress, which saw its favourability rating fall towards single digits. Humbled by public dissatisfaction, the Republican agenda for the run-up to November is far less ambitious.

Absent for now is a big, contentious docket similar to last year’s, which included the goal of writing new health care legislation to replace the Obama administration’s law. A long-promised overhaul of the tax code seems out of reach. When Representative Eric Cantor, the Virginia Republican and majority leader, issued a memo this week laying out the body’s initial legislative agenda, a centerpiece was a modest tax cut for small businesses.

Tea Party-backed governors elected in 2010 are struggling with similar difficulties. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker faces a recall vote after opponents turned in more than one million signatures in a campaign to oust him. In addition, five of his pre-gubernatorial aides and associates have been charged with felony offences ranging from embezzlement to child enticement.

It’s not much of a record for a party that rode into town boasting it would soon save America. With signs of recovery in the economy — the latest unemployment figures show joblessness is back to the level of Obama’s first months — and Obama’s favourability ratings inching upwards, the Tea Partiers’ proclaimed goal of driving the president from office remains an uphill climb. It took three years between the original Boston Tea Party and the Declaration of Independence, and even longer to win the war. Whether this generation of revolutionaries even survives that long may be open to question.

The reaction to Jodi Kantor’s new book, The Obamas, illustrates the hyper-sensitive atmosphere of the White House during this painful period. A reporter in Washington for The New York Times, Kantor clearly admires the Obamas. Her book overflows with sympathy for them. Yet they treat her as an enemy.

The President’s press secretary dismissed the extensive reporting in The Obamas as “little more than the author’s own thoughts.” Michelle Obama, on CBS This Morning, declared that the report of her conflicts with White House staff is unfounded and that Kantor portrays her as “some angry black woman.”

She admitted she hadn’t read the book. She sounded unpleasantly like a movie star who expects to control everything said about her image and manages to get upset whenever that assumption proves incorrect, as it often does.

Kantor’s book turns out to be much more than the gossip collection some consider it (The Daily Beast called it a “White House Tell-All”). Those who deign to read it will find that Kantor substantially enlarges our understanding of the President.

Studying the Obama marriage, she draws a credible picture of how Michelle and Barack work together and influence each other. That leads her to an enlightening account of his attitudes, his unlikely presidency and the troubles at its core.

Michelle often says Barack is not a politician; he’s better than that. Of course, he’s a politician, as how could he not be; but among politicians, he’s an extremely odd case.

For instance, he doesn’t much like Congress. He possibly likes the idea but certainly not the reality. Kantor describes a moment during his brief career in the Senate when he sat listening to a senator droning through a tiresome speech. He passed a note to a colleague: “Shoot. Me. Now.” The speaker was Senator Joe Biden, then already a famous gasbag and later the Obama choice as vice-president, perhaps picked as the best of a bad lot.

The Obamas rarely hide their low opinion of Congress, and make little effort to flatter its members by socializing with them. Kantor describes a Super Bowl party when Obama agreed to invite some members of the House. They naturally expected the usual political stroking. Instead, Obama ignored them and watched the TV set. He thought the purpose of the evening was the game.

Yet he later expected Congress to support his legislative program because it was, he believed, the right thing to do. He comes across as blithely innocent, in the sense of guileless, naive, unworldly. He didn’t quite grasp that he needed political friends. In the same way, he believed he could declare commentary on his wife out of bounds — and that journalists would obey his wishes, rather than ignore them, as they had with the Reagans, Clintons, etc.

Each of the last seven presidents elected before Obama brought with them serious experience in managing the political system. All of them had been governors or vice-presidents, so they knew about the intense horse-trading that precedes every political accomplishment in the United States.

Earlier presidents also had experience of executive mansions, either as frequent visitors or residents in the official homes of governors. The Obamas, with no such experience, found life in the White House a series of unpleasant surprises. Even Michelle, who had seriously considered staying behind in Chicago with the girls, had no idea how enclosed she would be, how much a prisoner of schedules and rules. Kantor makes it clear that the Obamas experienced their introduction to their new home as a nightmare.

His predecessors had also been forced to learn about their own inadequacies, in a way that Obama had not. He was warned, when choosing his staff, that he was encouraging turmoil among the economic advisors by appointing experts unlikely to get along. He replied that he could lead them past their grievances through gentle mediation, one of many times when he overrated his own abilities.

In office, Michelle thought cabinet officers and others should do more of the jobs, such as speeches, that were falling to the over-worked president. Kantor explains the problem: Obama took those assignments because he believed he could do them better than anyone else. Soon he was speaking so often that it was hard to remember, a day later, what he had said.

Knowing what Kantor tells us, we can no longer wonder why Washington has so disappointed Obama and Obama has so disappointed his supporters. Given his way of thinking, it would have been astonishing if things had turned out any other way.